Schizophrenic UI Techniques
There are certain UI techniques you can read about everywhere as to how these should not be used in practice. Nonetheless, they still show up regularly in UI designs.
Why the designers still use them even though they are against them?
1. Hated Hamburger Menu
Hamburger Menu is being discussed everywhere. Everyone talks about how unusable it is. People don’t click on it as they don’t know where to click. Also they often cannot understand what those 3 short lines underneath mean (which is the simplified illustration of hamburger).
Surely, the Hamburger Menu adds an extra step in the page browsing process. The user must first click on the menu icon and only then choose a specific subpage. On one side it prolongs the session (which is good), but it also results in a worse conversion rate (which is bad).
There’s no point to talk about pros and cons of the Hamburger menu. It still will be commonly used.
Paradoxically the more UI community hates the Hamburger Menu, the more often you can come across it :) Why is that so?
One reason may be the relatively common use of the Hamburger Menu for secondary navigation. In this case the Hamburger Menu is more less a good choice — it hides less important menu items and makes it more compact.
Another common use for the Hamburger Menu is its use for the responsive versions and apps. The Hamburger menu is not UI anti-pattern itself because its usage has its merits in some projects. But the designers increasingly go beyond used patterns and implement the Hamburger Menu as the primary site navigation.
The result?
Users are getting used to Hamburger Menu and this suppresses the whole hate about it. And the end-users (as well as the designers) start to accept it.
2. Modal windows
Modal windows belong to other UI elements that should not be used on the websites. They look much alike the pop-ups — they are also annoying and should be forbidden :)
But despite this fact you can come across them at every step. Even though it’s an important message for the user or some key setting (e.g. of user account).
Modal windows are better suited for designing interfaces rather than web pages. So why the designers don’t let them be and continue highlighting important content via such an inappropriate technique?
3. Dropdowns
The implementation of dropdowns is another schizophrenically used technique. It should not be done, but still (almost) everyone is doing it.
Yes, dropdowns, similarly to Burger Menus, make sense in some cases when their use is functional. For example in apps or mobile version of the websites due to the lack of space when all the various actions cannot be explicitly displayed.
The problem is the unnecessary hiding
Dropdowns in desktop website versions are like anti-pattern. It is unreasonable hiding all the items in dropdowns if they fit nicely on the page.
Additionally, the users don’t know what to do next on the website — until they click on the dropdown. Again it is the unnecessary addition of extra steps users must undertake.
A similar negative phenomenon is replacement of text by icons which is used more and more regularly these days. Apart from the notoriously known icons for email or phone contact, the designers started replacing other actions on the website with icons too.
Misunderstanding occurs — users often don’t understand what the particular icon means as they haven’t seen it yet.
4. Infinite scrolling
You might say that infinite scrolling is a good UI technique… so why is it included in this list? Because it is misused on places where it is inappropriate.
When ok
Infinite scrolling makes sense within social networks. Like Facebook, Twitter, or even Instagram. It’s great for killing time — the users can scroll through endlessly and still get more content.
However, mostly it is about quick visual scanning of images/ key messages without effort to dig deeper into more detailed content.
When NOT ok
Designers started to implement infinite scrolling on the websites where it isn’t suitable. For example on blogs. The lengthy scrolling through large number of blog posts does not provide users with a pleasant experience.
Especially when the user returns to the blog website and wants to find the specific article he/ she read some time ago.
Infinite scrolling makes searching for an older article more difficult than the standard pagination.
It is not appropriate to hide the footer on the page. User won’t be able to reach the page footer when infinite scrolling is used.
UI Evolution
Schizophrenia in applying these UI techniques is that everyone knows that they are not supposed to be used (or to a limited extent only), but they are still used in the designs.
By becoming more and more deployed, users are willy-nilly getting used to them… and from the “unwanted” becomes a wrong trend.
Have you ever seen an inappropriately used Hamburger Menu, modal windows, dropdowns or infinite scrolling? And if so, on which websites? Let me know!
